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Oh, the weather outside is frightful. No really, it is. Raging wind and rain.

Good weather for bookworms.

I usually enjoy some of my best reads over the festive period. This is partly down to good fortune – I’ve always managed to take the period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve as holiday. There’s time to hunker down amidst the hustle and bustle and happy whirl of socialising and rediscover the quiet pleasure of reading.

Escapism and fantasy has served me well over the festive season. I remember exactly when I began The Lord of the Rings: Christmas Day 1999 in that sleepy post-dinner lull. The family snoozed; I trotted off to Mordor. For some reason, anything with a gothic tinge to it also appeals over the Christmas period. Is it the short days, the deathly hush of snow (if we get it), the sense that something mysterious and barely understood is happening out there in the darkness beyond the brightness of lamps and strings of Christmas lights? I like to think that this is why Carlos Ruiz Zafón chose to begin The Prisoner of Heaven, the third instalment in his Barcelona-set and neo-gothic-influenced Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, at Christmas time. (PS Charles Palliser explains how the unease that comes from the unknowable is part of the peculiar appeal of the gothic in this fab article for the HuffPost).

But back to Ruiz Zafón. What a feast his Cemetery of Forgotten Books series is. Blurb writers and reviewers fall over themselves to try to describe the number of genres the books sashay through. I’ll have a go: each is like an old-school, Wilkie Collins-type sensation novel meets historical drama (we are in Franco’s Spain) with a hefty dose of Grand Guignol. Oh, and LOTS of fun intertextuality. The Shadow of the Wind, the ‘first’ book in the series, paid homage to David Copperfield and other Dickensian bildungsromans, amongst other works. While The Prisoner of Heaven’s debt to The Count of Monte Cristo is writ large, other references are more playful: a priest who shelters the fugitive Fermín Romero de Torres catches him eyeing the silverware – “I’ve read Les Misérables too, you know.”)

In fact, apart from Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, I’ve never come across an author who is so blatantly writing for readers who love reading; who love literature as ‘high’ and ‘low’ art; who know their classics, from Cervantes to Dickens, but who also revel in a meaty bit of genre fiction. In fact, in the universe of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, those who dismiss popular, ‘trashy’ fiction (like the crime thrillers the enigmatic character David Martín writes) inevitably turn out to be self-aggrandising villains.

An angel in Montjuic cemetery, Barcelona, an important place in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. Get me to Barcelona for the next bookish pilgrimage, I beg you.

The Prisoner of Heaven was in some ways a more satisfying (and certainly a pacier) read than the previous instalment, The Angel’s Game. I say ‘series’. It’s more a cycle of novels, which can ingeniously be read in any order – although apparently the fourth and final novel in the cycle (hurry up and publish it, Carlos!) will provide the key. The end matter in my copy of Prisoner (which was genuinely enlightening about the importance of Barcelona to Ruiz Zafón’s work) included an interview with the author himself in which he let slip this tantalising statement about the upcoming ‘final’ book in the series:

The fourth and final novel…is the place where the labyrinth of stories rearranges itself again and everything is put into yet another perspective. This is when we’ll really see the big picture and get to the very essence of the stories, of what is behind each of the books. Even if readers by the end of Prisoner feel that now they really know what this chess game is about, they don’t.

So don’t go into Prisoner expecting any resolution or dénouement, as I did (not knowing there was a fourth novel to come!) But there are plenty of surprises in store, and we do learn more about the Sempere family and the wonderful Fermín Romero de Torres, as well as other characters that have populated Shadow and Angel’s Game. I realised after finishing The Angel’s Game that the word ‘game’ is central to understanding what Ruiz Zafón is doing in these books, and the above statement seems to back this up. Thinking about the implications of the author as God, as supreme creator (and manipulator) helps make the slippery and sub-plot strewn Angel’s Game a bit less disorientating and even more intriguing.

My copy of El Prisionero del Cielo (original Spanish title). I was too chicken to read it in Spanish (though would have probably struggled with my just-about-AS Level Spanish anyway…)

What really makes Prisoner sing is its focus on the much-loved, wildly successful character of Fermín Romero de Torres and his backstory. At the end of the world there will be cockroaches and Fermín. Ebullient survivor and free-thinking philosopher, his wit, maxims and energy alleviate the melodrama and the often disturbing portrayal of life under the Franco regime. By only the second page, he’s back on form with his suggestion to save the bookshop from financial ruin:

“Perhaps if by chance I was seen arranging the shop window in my underpants, some lady in need of strong literary emotions would be drawn in and inspired to part with a bit of hard cash. According to expert opinion, the future of literature depends on women and as God is my witness the female is yet to be born who can resist the primal allure of this stupendous physique”.

(Credit must also be given to translator Lucia Graves for keeping Fermín’s voice so consistently…well, Fermínish.)

So it was a gothic-nuanced end to 2013 for me, but one with a comic touch. All in all, sounds like a pretty good finish to the reading year.

Kate Wilkins

A lifelong bookworm and omnivorous reader, this blog is a geeky outlet for my miscellaneous thoughts on good fiction (all genres - but I especially love literary fiction, fantasy and YA), reading habits and writers I rate. No doubt a few other random topics will creep in as well.

I love France and speaking French, so some of these posts will have a French flavour. Fellow Francophiles (or anyone, for that matter!) can read my reviews of new French fiction on the site
MaVieFrançaise.

I'm also trying to read more Spanish novels in their original language and discover more literature in translation.